Everyone here knows that I have very little love for Ryan these dahys, but when he does something right, I will give him his props. From the article:

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Wednesday persuaded Republicans to postpone votes on bringing back legislative earmarks until 2017 after reminding members of President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington.

House Republicans were set to hold a secret ballot on changes to their internal conference rules that would have allowed lawmakers to direct spending to projects in their districts under certain circumstances.

Based on what lawmakers were saying in the meeting, “it was likely that an earmark amendment would have passed,” according to a source in the room.
“Ultimately, the Speaker stepped in and urged that we not make this decision today,” the source said.

Behind former Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Republicans banned earmarks after winning the House in 2010 and have stuck by that policy despite grumbling from both sides of the aisle.

I am glad Ryan put an end to this terrible, terrible idea, and very impressed he did it for the right reason. I am really, really angry that the republican establishment douche-bags thinks it is time to bring back pork barrel spending now that they are in the majority. WTF, have you not glommed that the fact so many people voted for Trump was precisely this sort of statist waste, you fucking idiots?

With the GOP now set to control both Congress and the White House next year, some Republicans are agitating for change.

Reps. John Culberson of Texas, Mike Rogers of Alabama and Tom Rooney of Florida filed an amendment to GOP rules that would ease the earmark ban by creating a new process for targeted spending.

A separate proposal by Rooney that focused more narrowly on Army Corps of Engineers projects appeared to have the votes to pass on Wednesday, several lawmakers said.

Not only no, but hell no. As was pointed out before: no matter how good the original intention of the idea – and I am not saying these people have good intentions at all, and suspect they are teeing this up this way precisely because they can get the votes from others that actually in this one case see this as a good move – it will end up abused.

Short cuts even for what some might believe to be good things, just leaves the door open for others that later come along, to do bad things, as a lot of liberals, driven psychotic because Trump inherited the government machine they just spent the last 8 years weaponizing to force thing their way, are now realizing.

Mo earmarking. Despite all the arguments that it is needed to make some thing move faster, this idiotic practice is all but guaranteed to devolve back into what it was: a machine to allow those that use that practice to collect campaign money by pushing for pork barrel spending at the tax payers expense.

Here is some advice Mr. Ryan: never let this shit come back under the “Drain the swamp” administration. if you do, I am going to assume you did that because you wanted to sabotage this move to defang the establishment.

Just so we can finally have someone have a politician that can claim they reduced the rediculously large size of a bureaucratic, inefficient, politically biased, corrupt, and largely inept government and be right about it. And all we would need is for Trump to be elected!

If you needed more proof our government was not serving us citizens, shit like this should leave you with no doubt that Leviathan could stand to shed some of the bloat. Yeah, I know that Trump’s election would only remove 25% of its size 9if these shitbags actually were kind enough to keep their word), and I personally would prefer to see at least half of it, if not more, go up in smoke. I wonder if these idiots would also move to Canada and do the country a double service!

Puerto Rico, whose residents are U.S. citizens, has been mired in recession for a decade and borrowed heavily to balance budgets. Despite the shaky economy, investors snapped up its debt for years thanks to generous tax incentives. The borrowing spree, however, did little to create economic opportunity on the island, and residents have steadily left for employment on the U.S. mainland, eroding Puerto Rico’s tax base.

So this problem was caused by leftist government that wanted to spend more than the economies they crippled could sustain, to buy votes of all reasons, borrowed massive amounts of money to balance their budgets. Does this sound familiar to you at all? At least some Puerto Ricans affected by this stupidity had the ability to skip town and go to the US, whether it was to find gainful employment or just move to some blue state and suck at the government’s teat there, to avoid the catastrophe. Where are those of us in the US going to go when we face this reality?

Government economic policy that is set up to make participants in any economy dependent on buying favors from the members of said governments, always end up producing pain and do little to produce economic growth. But it sure makes a lot of connected people wealthy and in turn puts a large amount of cash into the campaign coffers of the political class that has implemented this machine. Hence, despite the massive debt buyout in Puerto Rico, there was no economic benefit. Again I ask, does this all look familiar to anyone? It seems quite obvious that what we are seeing in Puerto Rico can directly be inferred as the future of many US blue states as well as the US economy in general under the Obama administration.

Back to this issue at hand. As the article points out, republicans rallied by Paul Ryan in congress are pushing legislation that would restructure Puerto Rico’s debt. My concern is that this is nothing more than a totally temporary bandaid solution, and that it will not only not fix the underlying issue, which is that these fuckers will keep borrowing to buy votes and do nothing that would fix their abysmal economic conditions, but just delay the inevitable: Puerto Rico basically asking the US tax payer to foot the bill for all the squandered money. I feel this way because of news like this. And once Puerto Rico gets what amounts to a bailout, you can bet that Illinois, California, and every other blue state out there that has the same model of borrowing so they can spend on vote buying while all that spent money does nothing to improve economic conditions in general, will all show up in DC and ask for the same.

Whatever crap congress puts together should also destroy the blue state economic model as it exists today. Without that, we are just pushing the problem out and increasing the final cost of bailing out these idiots. The blue state model needs to die before it kills the country as a whole.

In case you don’t live in the US, today is tax day. If you are like me, you set it up so Uncle Sam takes the least amount possible during the year from your paycheck, and after you do your taxes, sent these parasites a check for whatever you owe them. Unlike most of the people that tell you our system is unfair because others are doing better than them, I can actually control my spending and even do a bit of saving. I know how to make my money work better for me and don’t need to use government as a savings plan to make sure I don’t blow my cash on blow, booze, and bitchez. That whole thing about if we magically managed to redistribute the world’s wealth equally today, by the end of the month, with so few exceptions we can drop them as statistical noise, we would be back exactly where we started, with the same people complaining about how the system is rigged against them and looking for a handout. But that’s not what this piece is about.

The thing is that we have 2 candidates, both in the same party, telling us DC should be taking even more money from the productive so they can increase the number of people sucking at the government teat. Shit, one of them has dropped any pretense of reality, and is promising $18 trillion in new entitlements and government handouts. My favorite one is free college. We get told that college has now become a necessity for people to qualify for better jobs, and thus, college should now be treated like so many other things the left wants us to now take as obligations of the productive to pay for the masses to have. I have yet to get any of the “free college” morons to explain to me why I should expect this to not result in college educations turning into even bigger wastes of money and time than they have become today. After all, we already have a government run free K-12 education system, and nobody that has a modicum of honesty and scruples, believes this system has been anything but an abysmal failure. It used to suffice to finish high school to actually be qualified for good employment. Then government took that over and dumbed it down so the failure of the unionized but well connected education establishment could avoid owning the miasma they created, and we all know how many people now leave high school without having met even the lowest of standards to show they actually worked on getting educated. Anyone else find hilarity in the fact that it is the same people that fucked over the K-12 system that now want to take over and make college free as well? That’s gonna end so well…

Anyway, back to talking taxes. Don’t get me wrong. I understand that we should pay some taxes. My disagreement is with a system that allows people that don’t pay anything to elect politicians that then tell the rest of us we need to pony up even more of our money for them to expand the abuse and corruption already rampant in the system. The best change to save our system of government right now, the one that would do the most to curb government abuses across the board, would be a flat tax and the abolishment of the IRS. If everyone has to pay an equal percentage, we will all have the same skin in the game, and with people that vote for a living suddenly out of that job, DC might finally be forced into fiscal responsibility. Even more important, the current corrupt system that allows the political aristocracy to abrogate itself unlimited wealth and power by forcing the rest of us to buy favors from them, especially taxation mitigation related favors, would implode overnight. No wonder that neither the collectivist & crony economy party nor the less collectivist and crony economy party want to do that.

As you send more of your hard earned pay to DC to be squandered by the vote buying aristocracy and their schemes and scams, remember that the answer to quite a few of this great country’s problems is actually quit simple. A flat tax would do away with so many of the special mechanisms that have propped up this dysfunctional bloated government we have today and in a single move force DC into dealing both with the economic reality they have created as well as return some sanity to the political class. It is therefore that it is anathema to the current political aristocracy whom would lose drastically should the status quo be upset. A man raped every year by the big government state – so people that pretend they mean well ca keep buying votes from close to half of the country that has no skin in the tax paying game – can dream.

Uncle Sam’s financial statements are so bad the Government Accountability Office (GAO) flunked him for the 19th year in a row.

The Department of Defense, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Department of Agriculture have books in such bad shape coupled with the country’s out of control debt and spending, that GAO “did not render an opinion on the federal government’s consolidated financial statements,” it said Monday.

Comptroller General of the United State Gene Dodaro warned danger lies ahead if policymakers don’t change the country’s unsustainable long-term fiscal path.

“Growing debt held by the public, which is now about 74 percent of the Gross Domestic Product could limit the federal government’s flexibility to address new or unforeseen challenges, such as another economic downturn or a large-scale disaster,” Dodaro said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government ran a bigger deficit in January, pushing the imbalance so far this budget year up 6.2 percent from the same period a year ago.

The Treasury Department said Wednesday the deficit for January stood at $17.5 billion compared to $10.3 billion a year ago. For the first four months of the budget year that began in October, the deficit widened to $194.2 billion from $182.8 billion during the same period last year.

The budget deficit has gradually narrowed since 2012, which was the fourth straight year in which it topped the $1 trillion mark. The improvement reflects the country’s economic recovery from recession. The government is seeing higher tax revenues as people go back to work and smaller payments for safety-net programs such as unemployment assistance. It also represents efforts by Congress to control deficits through higher taxes and across-the-board spending cuts.

First off, the AP political hacks are full of shit when they pretend there has been an economic recovery of any kind. These assholes have been playing fast and loose with the numbers for 6 years now to convince people that the idiotic tax and spend, big government nanny-state, central planned practices favored by the collectivists in charge, actually work. But the facts are that the only people doing well are the super-rich and the freeloaders. And of course the political class has really raked in the dough and drastically expanded their ability to lord it over us serfs. The middle class however, is getting hammered. The number of employed people in this country is at an all-time low, and the trending shows that it will go lower despite all the efforts to pretend otherwise. The number of freeloaders has also hit a new record, and the trending shows that it will continue to go up. The really rich, the people the left loves to pretend to hate, are raking in the cash. The country is being invaded, by design, and with help from the nanny-state entities in our government that want to fundamentally change the balance of power by making the freeloader class undefeatable at the polls. That’s “social justice” and the signs of an economic recovery for the left I guess.

Recovery my fucking ass. And the government is raking in a ton of cash in taxes despite their actions and efforts, mostly by fucking over businesses and the upper middle class. The point that should never be lost is that the left will never lower spending. These excuse makers responsible for this propaganda piece masquerading as news all but admit that they are cool with the insane jump in spending, because the tax revenue is up! The label “Tax and spend” is absolutely accurate. I bet they saw a projected 3% jump in revenue, so they did a 6.2% jump in spending. That’s what leviathan does.

We need to get rid of the collectivists and dismantle the “vote for a living” state they have created before the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.